The Freelancers Guide to Successful Content Curation

Many social media pundits claim that content curation will prove to be the next biggest thing in the arena of online entrepreneurship and obviously, freelancers with specific skills to perform the job of content curation will gain a good fortune out of it.

The biggest reason behind these predictions about the profitable expectations of content curation is the fact that the content on the Internet is increasing rapidly at every minute and according to some experts, within a few years, the content on the Internet will be doubled or more within every 72 hours or even less. Experts believe that this huge amount of content will offer a great opportunity for Internet marketers to gain online influence so that they may attain more customers for the products or services they are trying to market. However, it can prove to be a daunting task to refine the relevant and quality content available on the Internet and this difficulty can prove to be a great chance for the freelancers to gain an important place in the space of Internet marketing. This is the reason why it is important for freelancers to know everything about content curation as an especial skill and how to master that skill.

What is Content Curation?

Internet is a huge pool of a vast quantity of content that can be used for specific purposes. However, it is very important to recognize the quality of content and to arrange it in a meaningful manner so that anyone who is seeking for any information on Internet to share with others to achieve a definite goal may find it easy to attain the right content of appropriate quality. The process of rearranging the huge amount of content available on the web so that it can be presented in an organized and sense full manner is known as content curation. The traditional meaning of curator is a content specialist who organizes the content assets in a cohesive and coherent manner so that the information can be presented in an attractive and explanative manner to attain the interest of the viewers.

Content curation involves the job of refining, cataloging, coordinating, and publishing the information around a specific subject. A content curator goes through all the possible available content and refines it to arrange the best possible content in a definite order of its importance and relevance so that it can be displayed in a proper way. Unlike the popular belief, content curation isn’t just about collecting links and preserving them, rather; it is the job of organizing all the links to present a particular context with proper explanation. A content curator is not just a person who can offer a number of links about a subject, rather; he is the person who has properly researched about that subject and can offer the best, well organized, and highly relevant content on any specific subject online.

What is the importance of Content Curation and who needs it?

The Internet space is continuously increasing and people are now creating and sharing content at an enormous speed and with time, this speed of content creation is going to be increased. Even now, thousands of new videos are regularly uploaded online. People write and publish blog posts at every other moment. There are millions of Twitter and Facebook users who update their status regularly.

To explain the enormity of content creation, let us consider the example of Facebook. The average user of Facebook creates around 90 sets of content in a month. According to Mark Zuckerberg, more than one billion people are actively using Facebook each month. That is, in a month, the Facebook users are creating around 90 billion pieces of content at an average. Add the content on Blogger, Twitter, Orkut, MySpace, WordPress, and other websites and independent blogs and you will find that the data or content on the Internet is getting immeasurable day by day. To put it simply, we are not living in an ocean of content that is expanding at a vast pace. A content curator is the person who knows where are the fishes that a person is looking for in this vast ocean. The content curator can easily offer a quality content of relevance to anyone who is in need of organized information. The role of content curator is certainly important because for a common person, finding the required information and using it in appropriate manner will require a lot of time and attention and in current world; time is the most costly resource that needs to be preserved.

However, who will need this highly specialized information or content assets in an organized manner and why?

According to the Content Curation Adoption Survey of 2012 that was organized by curate, the vast majority of Internet marketers believe that content curation is an important and beneficial strategy and they seek for content curation regularly. The main reasons for why Internet marketers are interested in the process of content curation and why are they actively seeking for content curation can be summarized as follows:

1) Very Little Relevant Information in the Vast Pool of Content

It has been observed that finding relevant content on a particular topic is becoming more difficult while the quantity of content is abysmally increasing. While Internet is a vast resource of content, finding the best and most appropriate content on a subject is becoming more difficult. Internet marketers feel that specific websites that offer curated and properly organized content offers a good solution for their problems. These websites offer links to relevant content and that reduces the burden of marketers to search for the appropriate content. If the best and most relevant content about a topic is a diamond, the curated websites prove to be a mine of diamonds. Those websites that offer regular quality content, gains greater support of marketers.

2) The Race to be the Thought Leaders

With the help of appropriate content curation, marketers can attain success in establishing their position as the thought leader. Marketers want to attain as many customers as possible however, the Internet customers are becoming smarter and they seek for a reputed and trustworthy brand before they may engage in Internet shopping. Those marketers who succeed in providing quality content gains the trust of customers. This content includes original content produced by the marketers and producers specifically to increase their sales and it also include the relevant content from market experts and competitors with their specific presentation and comments. By using this highly refined content, marketers can establish the trust of customers and once they succeed in establishing themselves as the thought leaders of the market, they find it easy to attain regular customers.

3) Increasing Influence of Social Media

As the number of active users of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook is increasing, people are heavily relying on social media as the perfect resource for relevant and timely information. As a result, marketers are trying to implement the strategy of on-demand news. Since marketers are required to create positive influence on these social media platforms so that they can attract more and more potential customers, they need to keep providing relevant information regularly on these social media websites so that they can share best content online. With the help of content curation, marketers can easily provide relevant content at a swift pace so that they may maintain and increase their influence on social media platforms.

4) Content is the King

Internet is virtually becoming the biggest market of the world and one can attain all major brands of any product or service directly online. These brands are actively engaged in providing relevant information, future prospects, customer services, and online shopping facilities to attain more customers. The success of Dell has encouraged almost all brands to experiment the idea of e-commerce which is increasing at such a high rate that e-commerce is actually offering a tight and tough competition to the biggest retailers of the world. This increasing influence of e-commerce has made it mandatory for online marketers to remain easily accessible and easily notable to those who are looking for specific services and products through search engines and social media platforms.

However, to become significantly visible on search engines and on social media platforms, the marketers need to provide best, most relevant and unbiased content regularly in an organized and attractive manner. To improve SEO, providing original, relevant and organized content is very necessary. Content curation helps marketers to provide unique and most appropriate content in an unbiased manner and that increases their visibility on Internet.

Thus, content curation is very important for the marketers to increase their visibility on the Internet which results in increased potential and regular customers and provides higher profit margins for the brands and their marketers.

Importance of Content Curation for Freelancers

Content curation is very important for freelancers too because marketers often take help of freelancer content providers to attain original, valid, relevant and unbiased content with proper search engine optimization to attain better visibility on Internet.

For freelancers, content curation is professionally essential while it can also be an interesting means of learning too. A freelance needs to provide relevant and latest content about a varied category of subjects. While a freelancer can take help of enormous amount of content easily available on Internet, they need to be especially skilled in acquiring and organizing the relevant content in an appropriate manner so that it can be shared effectively to attain the required purpose. Content curation is necessary for freelancers because it helps them to remain aware of the latest and most important information about any issue that needs to be covered under the content that they have to provide. For a freelancer, content curation is the process of remaining aware and alert about their field and subjects for which they need to produce content so that they can remain efficient at their job.

However, it is not easy to be a skilled content curator. The biggest problem in content curation is the enormity of content available on the Internet that a content curator will have to research to organize it in a meaningful manner within a short period. This can be very cumbersome and distractive but with the help of proper techniques and technological tools, this task can be made easier.

The Process of Content Curation

Content curation is a continuous process and a professional content curator will have to adopt this process in his daily life. The very first step of the process of content curation is to decide for a relevant topic, subject or issue. Once the goal is set, the next step is to seek the relevant information. While seeking the relevant information may seem to be burdensome, it is necessary and yet, it is just a step of content curation. Once content curators have attained enough information about the topic or issue, they need to analyze and refine the available information to make a proper sense out of it so that the content can be rearranged according to relevancy and appropriateness of it to achieve the goal. One may do so by writing a blog post containing the links of organized content to offer a particular meaning of what they have researched, refined and organized.

Making a relevant meaning out of the available content is a tricky job because it is necessary to provide appropriate meaning through your presentation in such a way that it meets the requirements of the content curator’s subject and goal. After this, the content curator needs to present this highly researched, refined, and reorganized content in an appropriate manner so that they may attain largest possible audience. It is necessary for the content curator to confirm that the presentation is in such a simple format that any person can not only understand it but can also make best use of it with ease.

Tools of Content Curation

Obviously, the most difficult and burdensome step of the process of content curation is to find relevant information. While one can search about any topic or issue on any search engine such as Google, one may fail to attain quality information through simple search engines to perform content curation. However, there are enough tools to reduce the burden of seeking appropriate information and a content curator can make better use of the following tools of content curation:

The tagline of Scoop.it is “share ideas that matter” and it explains this tool perfectly. Scoop.it is currently considered as the best content curation tool which offers a series of content based on niche subjects and issues. After deciding for their choice of subject, a content curator can easily attain quality content. The next step is to read and analyze the contents and save them as a collection. One can attain everything including articles, videos, Facebook statuses, Twitter lists, and so on.

Storify is another quality service or content curation tool that can be used to attain optimized results. Create an account on Storify and start attaining the best content including tweets, blog posts, videos, images and so on. Storify itself provides the content in different niches in a series of meaningful presentations that can be used to attain better results.

Anyone looking forward to be a master content curator cannot ignore the service of Pearltrees, which is one of the finest curation tools. While one will attain a number of images, articles, videos, tweets, and so on to analyze and observe. One can simply use the browser application to “pearl” the content page that seems relevant, attractive, meaningful, and usable. One can easily share their “pearl” pages easily through Facebook, Twitter, Email, or on their own website.

In addition, there are a number of other highly efficient content curation tools such as StubmleUpon, Pinterest, Delicious, BagTheWeb, Bundlr, and so on that can be used by a content curator to attain appropriate content. However, it will the responsibility of the content curator to analyze, organize, rearrange, and represent this set of content about their preferred niche topic in a meaningful manner.

Content curation may seem to be a hefty task but it is becoming a necessity to maintain a grip on the Internet market. The most important aspect of content curation is that it is not a malpractice or activity of plagiarism. A content curator is not expected to copy and paste information from one content page to other. Rather, the job of content curator is to research the available content on Internet, refine it, reorganize it, and represent it in a unique manner with appropriate references and citations for the original content providers. It is very necessary to maintain the ethical lines of the job of content curation because the marketers that are looking forward to make better use of content curation are strictly looking for ways to gain trust of the customers so that they can establish their brands in the market. When a person simply steals some other person’s idea without offering proper credit to the original content creator, he is simply stealing the content while content curation is strictly the job of sharing the best content in a relevant, organized and appropriate manner.

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Meet the Author:

Reggie D.

Reggie Don is an avid content developer. He loves writing articles, writing tutorials, and traveling. He also has extensive experience in the Internet marketing niche.

One Comment

Mark Tilly December 12, 2012

Reggie, great overview of curation. I agree that it is an essential tool for freelancers as it is a great way to build content on your blog and stand out from the crowd. If you have a WordPress blog, you should check out MyCurator at http://www.target-info.com/mycurator/. Its a WordPress plugin that is a complete curation platform, making it easy to discover and curate content all within your blog. Free plans are available too.